On 23 October, President Emeritus Censu Tabone and his wife Maria celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary. All the family met for this occasion, that is to say their eight children (three sons and five daughters), except for one who couldn’t make it, and most of their 19 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. They first went to Mass together and then sat down to a great, celebratory lunch.
I had the pleasure of meeting Dr and Mrs Tabone recently and asked them how they had managed to achieve such a remarkable milestone in their lives. Dr Tabone succinctly described their married life as being a very happy one.
“We met in Marsalforn where I used to go for my summer holidays with my family and he lived in Gozo,” Mrs Tabone reminisced. “We started going out together but it took a long time before we got married as he had to finish his studies and find a job.” Dr Tabone added, “It was not like it is today, we were not given a stipend when we were at university and as a doctor it took time to build up a practice that would provide for a family’s needs.”
He graduated from the University of Malta as a pharmacist in 1933 and as a medical doctor in 1937. They married on 23 November 1941 in Gozo, where they still have a summer residence, and set up house in St Julian’s. As they got married during the war, the wedding was quite difficult to organise. No photographer could be found, for example, and only one photo was taken by one of their friends as a memento of this important date.
Dr Tabone had only one week’s leave after which he had to rejoin the army. He still has vivid recollections of the war as he served in the army for six years as a young medical officer and sergeant captain of the Royal Malta Artillery. He was stationed mainly at Fort St Elmo, in Valletta, where about 10,000 soldiers were posted. Dr Tabone remembers the first day the island was attacked and bombarded. There were six costal guns but no anti-aircraft weaponry, so they were sitting targets.
It was in the early hours of 10 June 1940 when everybody was still asleep that bombs were dropped on the fort. He rushed out of his quarters and ran to the Medical Inspection room. “I had forgotten to put on my epaulets, which showed my rank, in the rush. But everyone knew who I was,” he said. When he got to the waiting room he found all the regiment waiting for him. “Normally I had only about five patients, but thousands of people were there that morning,” he remembers, “I told them: ‘I cannot see my face but I can see yours, which are very white. I’m sure that I’m white too so those who are not sick have to go back to work as I have done.’ Five minutes later when I looked up, there was nobody waiting for treatment. I met some of these soldiers after the war, even when I was President, and they all reminded me of this episode. It was a sort of bond between us as it was our first contact with war. The doctors were very much in demand after bombings. As the war progressed, we used to say that if your name was on a bomb, it would definitely find you.” Luckily, Dr Tabone didn’t have his name on one.
And he escaped from many similar, dangerous incidents. Later, he was sent to another hospital where the ammunition for the island was stored and heavily protected. One early morning they bombarded this hospital. Dr Tabone was the only officer there and therefore the last to leave and take refuge in the nearest trench. The first bomb hit the Red Cross sign and then the building started to collapse, and debris filled the trench he was in. “After about 15 or 20 minutes I heard people walking above me,” explained Dr Tabone, “I started shouting for help. I was the first out then 20 people followed. They all survived!” Dr Tabone can talk about the war for hours and he is pleased when people are interested in learning more about this period, like the children of San Andrea school he met a couple of weeks ago.
After years of experience, Dr Tabone thinks that the worst thing in the world is colonisation, as it creates the greatest difficulties. “Coming to a country and making its inhabitants more or less our slaves, is the worst thing we can do. Look at Africa: Europe colonised it and now it is one of the weakest and poorest countries in the world. We have to preserve everyone’s freedom.” He added that even Malta still has some lingering elements of colonisation: “There are people who still have the spirit of colonisers, some leaders who take advantage of their position. Those who give orders and wait for others to obey, I attribute this to a coloniser attitude. It is not good for just one person to have all the power, as those who give orders are not always right. We have to struggle against it.”
Speaking about his political life, Dr Tabone said he is still a member of the executive committee of the Nationalist Party but “just to give a helping hand” he said. “I don’t want to take part in politics anymore. When I was President, I was completely dependent on politics. That was the shadow of the presidential status, but it was my choice!” he said smiling. Dr Tabone stressed that democracy is full of imperfections. “Democracy is the best system of government, but it is full of defects we should try and solve. Nevertheless, it remains the best system to involve the citizen in the decision process.” When asked which is the most serious defect in the actual system, Dr Tabone said it was the tyranny of the majority: “After an election, we become the slaves of the majority, the servants of the majority leader. I don’t know how to correct it, but we have to think about it. But till now, all the others systems of government we tried were worse.”
After the war, Dr Tabone went to the United Kingdom to take a post graduate course in ophthalmology and obtained a Diploma in Ophthalmology of the University of Oxford. Later, he obtained a Diploma in Ophthalmic Medicine and Surgery of the Royal College of Surgeons. “I still have the mentality of a doctor and I am always at my computer following the advances in medicine,” admits Dr Tabone, who himself contributed to it.
In 1946 he started an anti-trachoma campaign in Gozo as it was particularly prevalent on the island. Trachoma is a highly contagious eye disease that could result in blindness. “It is a kind of virus with very small germs that pass through all the filters we have,” explained Dr Tabone. “When I started to study trachoma, it was generally believed that antibiotics would change our way of practicing medicine but couldn’t be effective against germs. However, we did experiment with antibiotics to treat the disease and eventually discovered that these antibiotics could control and cure trachoma.” Practically all the cases were cured and Dr Tabone reported his results at a quadrennial British ophthalmologic conference. “I was a young man and nobody had heard of me before, so it was quite hard convincing everyone and they wiped the floor with me. I managed to gain the confidence of ophthalmologists when I operated with them. But I was not accepted willingly.” Finally, the World Health Organisation (WHO) heard about him and asked him to help it launch campaigns all over the world especially in Taiwan, Indonesia and Iraq and was a member of the International Panel of Trachoma Experts of WHO. He was one of the first ophthalmologists to work for WHO and was its consultant for many years.
Dr Tabone was also active in Malta where he helped found the Medical Officers Union in Malta, which is now the Medical Association of Malta, to fill the gap of regulation in the profession. He is its Honorary President at present.
Today, although he is retired, he continues to give medical advice to friends. And when he is not reading reports about new discoveries in medicine, he finds refuge in his workshop, where he likes tinkering with clocks.
During his campaigns around the world, Mrs Tabone stayed at home, looking after their children. “I found it very difficult, especially when he was in Taiwan for six months,” she admitted. “There was no phone and it took 13 days for letters to arrive. It was a big responsibility for me to bring up the children alone, and when he had his clinic, he used to come home really late but the children always waited up for him.” Nevertheless, she always supported him and encouraged him, in his profession and when he decided to go into politics. They stressed that the time when he was President was quite difficult as people were always asking for them and they didn’t have much time to themselves.
Speaking about the good and the bad moments
they shared together, Ms Tabone said that her worst memory was when she was confined to bed for two-
and-a-half months during a difficult pregnancy. The child was born prematurely and passed away 24 hours later. “We faced this terrible tragedy together; it was
really a hard time,” she
said.
As for good memories, they cannot tell which one was the best. “Life is a chain of incidents and you can’t say which one was the best,” declared Dr Tabone. “If there is a missing link in a chain, it will break and won’t make sense anymore.” Yet, they remembered with nostalgia the days when they travelled in Europe. “Once a year, we used to travel by car around Europe, leaving the children with the family. We were quite the pioneers travelling in this way.” But they never really stopped travelling as they went on many State visits all around the world during Dr Tabone’s presidency, like China, Australia and New Zealand, but not by car anymore of course.
When asked what the secret of their lasting relationship is, they replied in unison: “We never go to sleep without patching up a quarrel. We promised to always give each other a kiss of love in reconciliation before sleeping.” And their advice to everyone is to do the same. “Our conditions and situations in life have changed many times over the years but our love has endured,” concluded Mrs Tabone.